Looking under the hood: A comparison of techno-economic assumptions across national and global integrated assessment models

Volker Krey, Fei Guo, Peter Kolp, Wenji Zhou, Roberto Schaeffer, Aayushi Awasthy, Christoph Bertram, Harmen-Sytze de Boer, Panagiotis Fragkos, Shinichiro Fujimori, Chenmin He, Gokul Iyer, Kimon Keramidas, Alexandre C. Köberle, Ken Oshiro, Lara Aleluia Reis, Bianka Shoai-Tehrani, Saritha Vishwanathan, Pantelis Capros, Laurent Drouet, James E. Edmonds, Amit Garg, David E.H.J. Gernaat, Kejun Jiang, Maria Kannavou, Alban Kitous, Elmar Kriegler, Gunnar Luderer, Ritu Mathur, Matteo Muratori, Fuminori Sano and Detlef P. van Vuuren

Energy, 2019, vol. 172, issue C, 1254-1267

Abstract: Integrated assessment models are extensively used in the analysis of climate change mitigation and are informing national decision makers as well as contribute to international scientific assessments. This paper conducts a comprehensive review of techno-economic assumptions in the electricity sector among fifteen different global and national integrated assessment models. Particular focus is given to six major economies in the world: Brazil, China, the EU, India, Japan and the US. The comparison reveals that techno-economic characteristics are quite different across integrated assessment models, both for the base year and future years. It is, however, important to recognize that techno-economic assessments from the literature exhibit an equally large range of parameters as the integrated assessment models reviewed. Beyond numerical differences, the representation of technologies also differs among models, which needs to be taken into account when comparing numerical parameters. While desirable, it seems difficult to fully harmonize techno-economic parameters across a broader range of models due to structural differences in the representation of technology. Therefore, making techno-economic parameters available in the future, together with of the technology representation as well as the exact definitions of the parameters should become the standard approach as it allows an open discussion of appropriate assumptions.

Keywords: Integrated assessment models; Techno-economic assumptions; Capital and O&M costs; Conversion efficiency; Lifetime; Levelised cost of energy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (34)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218325039
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:172:y:2019:i:c:p:1254-1267

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2018.12.131

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().